Tim Leach: A Winter War

The last sliver of the sun fell below the horizon, and no riders came. In answer, a little sigh from those gathered at the edge of the village, nothing more than that at first. But as though it had been a horn calling them to war, the children were off, giving little yips and hollers as they formed bands and chased one another round the huts and under the carts. Slower, more reluctant, the women followed them.

One woman lingered at the edge of the village, eyes fixed to the absent sun, still as one in a trance or struck by a spell. The older woman hurried to her, the snow crunching beneath her boots, and said: ‘Best to get home. No more use waiting out here in the cold.’

The other woman turned her head slowly, her eyes dull. She was young, the war scars still fresh upon her skin. ‘They should have returned by now, Arite,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t they?’

‘Not if they won,’ Arite answered. ‘They will be raiding far beyond the Danu, if they put the Romans to flight.’

The younger woman returned her gaze to the horizon. ‘Sometimes I think we should not watch for them. A bad omen.’

‘Think of when they return – that will be a fine day.’

‘If it could stay this way… it would not be such a terrible thing.’

Arite grinned, a wolfish flash of teeth in the twilight. ‘You would not miss the young men about the village? I know I would.’

‘I would not miss the killing.’

Arite’s smile fell away at once, in its place a sharp set of the jaw. ‘Get home,’ she said, ‘and do not let the others hear you speak that way.’

The crunch and patter of quick steps in the snow, and the younger woman was gone. Arite lingered a moment longer, giving one last look out to the horizon. Then she was back amongst the huts, picking restlessly at the long, loose ends of her dress with one hand and holding the collar close with the other against the fell wind that blew in from the west.

The children were still circling and brawling, though their numbers were fewer now, many of them picked off by their elders. Without breaking stride, Arite plucked a small figure from one of the tumbling warbands. It was not a girl whose face resembled hers, but that was not such a strange thing in this place. Everywhere, children went with women who were not their mothers.

Snatched from the games, the child sulked and whined like a kicked dog for a moment. She went limp, and a moment later Arite permitted the child to walk back to their hut rather than be carried – an honourable courtesy given to the captive.

Their home was a crude one, a life half learned. A poorly cut chimney let the smoke fill the room, and the bedding was nothing but a pile of blankets. There were well-fashioned tents that might have been warmer than that hut, for the wind cut through little cracks in the walls and went against the skin like a knife.

Arite cursed and muttered to herself, trying to fashion some crude blockades against the fingers of wind that worked their way into the room. The child flung herself into a pile of blankets, but at once there was a click of the fingers, and the child fell to mixing the grain, stirring the pot over the fire.

They busied themselves with their tasks for a time, the child keeping half an eye on the woman, looking for a response. At first, Arite feigned not to notice the slackness with which the child worked the grain, the deliberately clumsy strike of spoon against cooking pot. She strode around the room straightening and correcting as she went, her fingers straying across the little mementoes scattered about it. A broken arrow with russet red fletchings. An image of a dragon carved into a horn. Last of all was the greatest treasure – folded into three separate pieces of cloth that she carefully unwrapped one layer at a time. She shook into her palm a tiny oval gold coin, a relic of some long dead empire, tossing it in the air to watch the firelight wink against the turning metal, before snatching it back.

She tilted her head to the side, and saw the light of the fire in the child’s eyes.

‘Do you ever dream of that coin, Tomyris? In your hands, impressing the other children, perhaps? It would buy you a good sword and lance, on the day you join the warband.’

Tomyris sat up stiffly. ‘It is not mine,’ she said, for a child she was, but she already had the nomad’s pride. Out upon the steppe a thief was nothing but a slow and cowardly murderer, for to take a horse or bow or bag of grain was to take someone’s life as well.

A twitch of the lips at seeing the child so haughty, but Arite covered it with her hand. ‘Quite so, and well spoken. Kai has taught you well.’

‘Bahadur gave it to you, didn’t he?’

‘He did. Did he tell you the story of how he found it?’

The child wrinkled her lip. ‘He told me lots of stories of how he found it.’

‘And what was your favourite one? The one with the ogre and the golden sheep?’

‘No.’ She paused and thought it over. ‘I like the one with the apple tree, the people under the sea.’

‘That is a good story,’ said Arite. ‘Now tell me, why do you sulk more than usual? Speak. And stop rattling my bowls. If you break them, we shall be eating from the floor like the hounds.’

The child stared at the ground, covered with their one fine furnishing. A well-woven carpet, where tigers ran after stags in endless looping forests. It was faded and marked by generations of footfalls – a treasure from the old times, when their people had lived in wagon and tent and wandered all across the plains.

‘They did not come back,’ she said.

‘We should not expect them back so soon. Not unless there were some disaster.’

‘Saka says they’re not ever coming back.’

‘Who is not?’

‘All of them. My father.’ A pause. ‘Bahadur. Or Chodona.’ And those last two names were spoken with a child’s careful desire to wound.

The woman looked evenly at the child across the fire. ‘They may not be. You may have lost Kai. I may have lost my husband. My son.’ Her voice had held steady, but gave the faintest crack on that last word. ‘What would we do then?’

In the light of the fire, a glaze of tears on the girl’s eyes. But only for a moment, before she wiped them away. ‘Avenge them.’

‘Well spoken. Kai would be proud of you. That is one choice. Another?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if their enemies were too many to face? Or too far away to fight. What then?’

The child shook her head, curled her lip in irritation. ‘I do not know.’

Arite leaned forward and sampled the stew. She sat back, and said: ‘We would remember them. Could you do that, if you had to?’

She nodded.

‘You remember your mother, don’t you?’

Again the child nodded. For a moment a ghost was in the hut with them, a woman who made the air ring with raucous laughter as she chased her daughter round the campfire or when she leapt on Kai from behind when he returned from the hunt. Then she was gone, and it was just the two of them once more.

‘It is just like that,’ Arite said. ‘We remember them, and tell the stories. And so they live forever.’

Tomyris was still and silent for a time, staring at the dancing of the fire. Turning that thought over and over in her head, like a trader studying a finely glazed pot, searching for the flaw.

‘And if there are none left to remember?’ she said.

Arite gave no answer. For there was none to give.

The girl was weary then – not the tiredness of a child worn down from field and herd, but that of the rider on a long campaign, or the heartsick woman spurned by her lover. One who grows tired of the hard business of living. Arite had seen it many times before, but seldom in a child.